Abstract Manual labor is still strongly present in many industrial contexts (such as aerospace industry). Such operations commonly involve onerous tasks requiring to work in non-ergonomic conditions and to manipulate heavy parts. As a result, work-related musculoskeletal disorders are a major problem to tackle in workplace. In particular, back is one of the most affected regions. To solve such issue, many efforts have been made in the design and control of exoskeleton devices, relieving the human from the task load. Besides upper limbs and lower limbs exoskeletons, back-support exoskeletons have been also investigated, proposing both passive and active solutions. While passive solutions cannot empower the human's capabilities, common active devices are rigid, without the possibility to track the human's spine kinematics while executing the task. The here proposed paper describes a methodology to design an active back-support exoskeleton with backbone-based kinematics. On the basis of the (easily implementable) scissor hinge mechanism, a one-degree of freedom device has been designed. In particular, the resulting device allows tracking the motion of a reference vertebra, i.e., the vertebrae in the correspondence of the connection between the scissor hinge mechanism and the back of the operator. Therefore, the proposed device is capable to adapt to the human posture, guaranteeing the support while relieving the person from the task load. In addition, the proposed mechanism can be easily optimized and realized for different subjects, involving a subject-based design procedure, making possible to adapt its kinematics to track the spine motion of the specific user. A prototype of the proposed device has been 3D-printed to show the achieved kinematics. Preliminary tests for discomfort evaluation show the potential of the proposed methodology, foreseeing extensive subjects-based optimization, realization and testing of the device.

中文翻译：

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具有自适应骨干运动学的主动背支撑外骨骼的设计方法

摘要 体力劳动仍然广泛存在于许多工业环境中（例如航空航天工业）。此类操作通常涉及繁重的任务，需要在不符合人体工程学的条件下工作并操纵重型部件。因此，与工作相关的肌肉骨骼疾病是工作场所需要解决的主要问题。尤其是背部是受影响最严重的区域之一。为了解决这个问题，人们在外骨骼设备的设计和控制方面做了很多努力，减轻了人类的任务负担。除了上肢和下肢外骨骼，还研究了背部支撑外骨骼，提出了被动和主动解决方案。虽然被动解决方案无法增强人类的能力，但常见的主动设备是僵化的，无法追踪人类” s 执行任务时的脊柱运动学。这里提出的论文描述了一种设计具有基于骨干运动学的主动背部支撑外骨骼的方法。在（易于实现的）剪式铰链机构的基础上，设计了一种单自由度装置。特别地，所得到的设备允许跟踪参考椎骨的运动，即，在剪刀铰链机构和操作者背部之间的连接的对应关系中的椎骨。因此，所提出的设备能够适应人体姿势，保证支撑的同时减轻人的工作负担。此外，所提出的机制可以很容易地针对不同的学科进行优化和实现，涉及基于学科的设计程序，使其能够调整其运动学以跟踪特定用户的脊柱运动。所提出设备的原型已被 3D 打印，以显示所实现的运动学。不适评估的初步测试显示了所提出的方法的潜力，预见了广泛的基于主题的优化、实现和设备测试。